Douglas Adam’s Starship Titanic by Terry Jones

‘The Ship That Cannot Possibly Go Wrong’ is a novel based on the game Starship Titanic (written by Douglas Adams,) but due to timing constraints he was unable to write the novelization himself, so he approached the next best person – the voice actor of the parrot in the game – Terry Jones.

This is the one-and-the-same Terry Jones of Monty Python fame, and he is an extraordinary talent with science fiction, fantasy and comedy, irrespective of the medium.

Starship Titanic is an inane and hilarious (stylistically an amalgam of Douglas Adams and Terry Pratchett) space adventure that manages to conjure some pretty original and clever science fiction ideas, whilst conforming to the tropes we know-and-love.

A small band of humans are given a free cruise after the ships systems malfunction and it crashes through their roof. Before they can truly make a decision they find themselves in space, caught up in a grand scheme of corruption and greed and murder. But this is no mystery story – this is a race against time as they struggle to stop a bomb, fix the ship, fix their relationships, and have vague and hilarious alien sex.

The human characters are a bit under-developed and two-dimensional, but this contrast also plays well against the strange and over-the-top alien and robot characters, so it actually balances out quite nicely.

This book was written for one purpose alone – to promote the CD-ROM game, and it does so as one of the best game-to-novel translations I have read.

It’s a fast-paced book that catches you in it’s gravitational pull and refuses to let you go. I read it in one sitting: the book gave me no indication of when I could rest or catch my breath. It is an incredibly fun romp that I highly recommend for both young adults and a more mature audience.